Windows 10: A long journey: 2 second freezes

For the last few months, I have had problems with my Win 10 PC freezing for a couple seconds. I have been slowly whittling down the issue, but am stuck on the last step.


Attempt 1. While I was working, my screen would freeze and then turn black. This would happen 2-3 times a day. Notably, I could still use the Windows Key to bring up the Start Menu and see it on the screen. So this wasn't an issue of a bad cable or hardware problem, that I could tell.


It seemed to happen a lot while I was using Outlook, so I spoke with an Outlook support person, and they had me do a ton of different things, and it didn't help.


I started wondering if maybe it was Spotify, which I also use a lot. After digging in their forums, someone said I should try to download Spotify from the Windows store instead of from the website, due to some GeForce issues. I did that, and it definitely seemed to happen less frequently.


Attempt 2. But it still happened, and when I looked at the Windows Reliability monitor, which I never knew existed, I saw that I was still having hardware issues specifically: LiveKernelEvent, Code 117, often followed by strings that contained nvlddmkm.sys and other stuff. I believe this is nvidia related, but I am not 100% sure.


So I booted into safe mode, ran DDU to strip out all the nvidia things and then installed drivers from the last update, not the current one. That is, I installed 442.74.


I am now not having problems with the screen going dark, and so far, I have seen no hardware errors in reliability check.


But I am still getting these pauses of 2 seconds and it is driving me absolutely crazy. I note down the time and try to find something suspicious in the event viewer, but I can't seem to find anything.


Does anyone know how I can fix this and / or how to better track down where it is coming from? Is there a way to take the stats that appear in Task Manager and save them in a time series so that I can see if any weird spikes happen when the PC freezes? I am really grasping at straws.


Quick system info:


Operating System

Windows 10 Home 64-bit 10.0.19041 Build 19041

CPU

Intel Core i9 9900K @ 3.60GHz 32 °C

Coffee Lake 14nm Technology

RAM

32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1329MHz 19-19-19-43

Motherboard

Alienware 0R3FWM U3E1

Graphics

XB271HK 3840x2160@60Hz

XB271HK 3840x2160@60Hz

Intel UHD Graphics 630 Dell

3071MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Dell 34 °C 442.74 drivers

ForceWare version: 442.74

SLI Disabled

:)

 

Windows freezing every 2 seconds for a second at the time

Just to add a new comment. My old laptop -ThinkPad Levono 11e- after an upgrade to SSD and new memory, it started acting exactly as described above. I installed the AMD Radeon Crimson and all the updates that come with it, and solved the problem. It does not freeze every 2 seconds anymore !!!
Here is a list of a few things that I tried before this solution: fresh Windows 10 reset (keeping my files & deleting all of them), power management change, scanning multiple times for all the hardware and software.
Thank you for post about using the 'old' AMD Radeon driver!

 

Windows Vista Wont Install Freezes?

had the same problem, freezes and long installation including each step loading, in my case a bios update helped.

 

PowerDVD 9 freezes on startup for 10 seconds

My problem is that my PowerDVD 9 freezes whole system for 5-10 seconds while starting. It happens on my HD monitor Samsung 240HD. But when I connect 40 inch 720p tv it works great. Please, can u suggest what the problem or give some link to fix.